AlecStaar
 
I have just one word for you: GIT
 
AndyF

Why not go SATA, by then the market will be flooded with SATA HDD's and loads boards will have the controller built in...not to mention PCI-X support!

Alec, I've had some correspondance with Chris Lym at Cenatek during the past month. He has hinted as to what is coming down the pipe regarding the future of RocketDrive. Would you like a read? If so, I'll just copy it into this thread.

Here ya go. It's copied directly out of Outlook Express, so my initial email is on the bottom, with replies reading upwards.
 
I'm off to the pub! HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!! :D:D
 
 
Mr. Arthur Pappas,
 
I read your e-mail. Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. We are aware
of the market opportunity. From a business perspective, we are not at the
stage where we can target the masses yet. Like all leading edge
technologies, it is starting out a bit expensive and somewhat
exclusive. After time we will have problems ironed out (bootability,
capacity, price) and have some sales success within our initial target market.
 
We are working hard to reach our potential. Thanks for taking the time to
really think about our product.
 
-J
 
Chris,
Thank you for replying so promptly. I won't be able to wait till Q3/Q4 of
this year. So it looks like I will be stock piling DIMMs & continue to use
your fabulous RamDrive.
As for the proposed pricing of a bootable version; in my opinion the
current Rocket Drive is less than an ideal alternative to "regular" disks
simply because it's non-bootable. It should have been bootable from the
beginning. I truly feel this is a glaring omission, & believe a bootable
version will merely be seen by the industry as "getting it right the second
time around", so to speak. Saying that, I wouldn't pay any premium for the
bootable version, & would expect the current offering to take substantial
price cuts.
I also feel you would've had much greater market penetration if the major
marketing/advertising push for the Rocket Drive was without memory
installed, since many online vendors today are selling 512MB modules for
next to nothing (i.e., a lot less than the populated Rocket Drives sold by
Cenatek). Imagine me bragging up my (hypothetical) system to friends:
Pentium 4 (or AMD equivalent) @ xxx GHz
512 MB (or more) of whatever memory
Blah Blah video/sound card
2 x 4 GB CENATEK Rocket Drive stripe set for OS, intensive programs,
pagefile, temp files/cookies, etc
Bla Bla "conventional" hard disk for data/storage
Etc, etc
Chris,I really feel Cenatek missed the boat at targeting the correct (i.e.,
most profitable) end user. I mean it's all fine & dandy trying to sell
these things to Sys admins (on strict budgets) that overlook multi-thousand
dollar servers. But if Cenatek were my company, Rocket Drives would be
marketed to the same people you see spending untold thousands sooping up
their Honda Civics & other import cars > our youth! The possibilities for
market dominance for a product without peer is mind boggling.
With careful planning, & more importantly affordable pricing, Cenatek could
steal headlines from new video cards or cpu's at every major online tech
site on the Internet. Just imagine visiting www.tomshardware.com & the main
article is covering the new bootable 16 GB (16 x 1 GB DIMMs) Cenatek Rocket
Drive. I mean, many people have video cards that are well beyond the
requiremnts of games being played today anyway. Heck, at work I sell 2.53
GHz Pentium 4 machines all day long to grand mothers that want to save
their recipes & send email. When the performance freak comes in & asks for
upgrade advice because his pc "doesn't feel fast anymore", I have nothing
to offer him. He already has a 2.8GHz P4, GF4 video & U160 SCSI disks. The
true bottleneck in his system (i.e., the hard drives), are as fast as he
can buy. Nobody in their right mind will pay thousands for a Rocket Drive
in a home pc.
My dream? Easy! Cenatek rethinks their philosophy regarding the Rocket
Drive. This leads to a very small product line consisting of only 2 models:
· CENATEK SR-71 (or some other name more market attuned)
· unpopulated
· 4 GB max
· Bootable
· RAID friendly
· User friendly
· $US300 - $US400 (at the most)
· CENATEK PROFFESSIONAL:
· optionally populated
· as above with higher capacities & pricing
Find a chair at just about any lan party & all you hear is "what ya got
under the hood" conversation. Cenatek could take more than its own share of
consumer IT spending habits. Just think of the possibilities.................
Cheers,
Arthur Pappas
P.S. I would like to forward our conversation to the Cenatek CEO/President.
How would I do so? I'm interested in hearing a more "business minded"
perspective. By the way, do you have any Canadian resellers?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Lym" <clym@cenatek.com>
To: <XXX@XXX>
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 1:57 PM
Subject: RE: Sales Inquiry -- 11/23/02 - 2:04 AM
 
> Arthur,
>
> We're working on a bootable version, which should be
> available sometime in 2003. Probably the latter half,
> Q3 or Q4. We're also looking at going with PCIX but
> that will be even later than that. What price point would
> you pay for a bootable version in our current PCI form
> factor?
>
> Chris
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: XXX@XXX [mailto:XXX@XXX]
> > Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 2:05 AM
> > To: sales@cenatek.com
> > Subject: Sales Inquiry -- 11/23/02 - 2:04 AM
> >
> >
> >
> > +-----------------------+
> > | Cenatek Sales Inquiry |
> > +-----------------------+
> > Date: 11/23/02 - Time: 2:04 AM
> > -
> > Name: Mr. Arthur Pappas
> >
> > Title:
> > Phone: (XXX)XXX-XXXX
> > E-Mail: XXX@XXX
> > -
> > Product: Rocket Drive
> > Type of Question: Sales
> > -
> > Industry: Retail/Consumer Goods
> >
> > Application Use: File servers
> >
> > OS: Windows 2000
> >
> > Hardware: Engineering Workstation
> > -
> > Performance Issues:
> > Question/Comment: I am very interested in your
> > produst & have considered purchasing your Rocket Drive for
> > quite a while. But, the current design makes it useless to
> > me. I require a bootable version, & that is also 64bit/66MHz
> > (or PCI-X).
> >
> > Will such a device become a reality, or shall I just forget
> > it? If indeed it is being developed by Cenatek, when can I
> > expect it to be available?
> >
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >
> > Mr. Arthur Pappas
 
 
 
 
 
Jason Caulkins
CTO
CENATEK
HIGH Speed Storage Solutions
3118 Seminole Drive
Redding, CA 96001
530-222-5359
jcaulkins@cenatek.com
www.cenatek.com

Cenatek's RocketDrive sounds great, got it on my wish list...
 
but for now, I'm not having luck editing any of the "software" ramdrives that I've installed.
 
I can create a new "B:\" drive no problem but when I go to point the I.E temp files folder to it (the whole reason I wanted it, although my EYES ARE WIDE OPEN NOW!, thx Alec!), it gives me an error to pick a number between 1 and 0 to use for an amount of space to set aside for the temp files (this is seperate from the actual drive allocation, no problem there) and of course, there isn't a number in that range. No, 0, 1 and 1.5 do not work.
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Bottom line: I have used several free downloads today for this project and they all do their part creating the virtual drive, it's just that now SP2 won't let me set an allocation for the I.E temp files folder when trying to move it to this new "drive"

Thx for the reply, I finally got the new drive populated about an hour and 1/2 ago, AFTER REBOOTING but I still couldn't move files from the default windows IE cache folder to my new B:\ drive, matter of fact, right click\copy is not even an option from the IE temp folder. I just created a directory on the new drive and pointed to it after the TOOLS\IE OPTIONS\ SETTINGS\ MOVE FOLDER steps even though it wouldn't let me set an allocation size for the new folder on B:\, it did however populate the new drive with about 10 cookies or so from recent surfing.
 
All of this has been with ARSOFT as of the last try, even MS Ramdisk didn't work a'la Microsoft direct (I'm HOME so the directions didn't work since they were talking GROUPS, even though they said...)
 
I can see now that it is going to take some more tweaking since I seem to have a cookie from each recently viewed site (9 or 10 over last hour or so) but tons of new GIF & PNG image files still got written to the old IE temp folder so it isn't really doing me any good so far.
 
Again, appreciate your response... catching up to the new century LOL.
 
Just went back and looked at it again... when attempting to set the new drive to the drop spot for the IE temp folder, it still has the default folder being used (hence reason I still have all them new files in my default folder) and when trying to change it to the new drive/folder, it wants me to "pick a number between 1 and 0 for how much space the temp file folder will need to use". This is what I was refering to when saying that 0, .5 and/or 1 do not work... so irregardless of what version etc. I'm using, it WON'T ACCEPT ANY CHOICE.
 
That last sentence is IRT your reply:
 
Depends a great deal on WHICH one you choose, if you have the right one for the Operating System you use, & the specs of configuring it (depends on OEM (maker) of the software based Ramdisks in question).
 
I believe the reason it is taking the cookies is because of the regedit I made which affected the HISTORY key and the COOKIE key.
 
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\History
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\History
 
With the current setting, I'm loosing all my cookies apparently so I'll prolly put it back to the default cookie folder setting so my cookie utility will take care of that but that still leaves the problem with SP2 not letting me set the allocation size for the new folder on the TOOLS\IE OPTIONS\SETTINGS\MOVE FOLDER step (also, not selecting a size gives the error above too).
 
Among other places earlier, I was taking direction from here:
http://www.deny.de/hosted/df/ramdisk.htm
 
Note the 2nd paragraph under "3. Using Ramdisk:"
 
this "just slide the bar" part for setting the size limits doesn't work!
 
Prolly getting close, just around the bend I'm sure, thx.
[Edited by BillyG. on 2004-09-13 23:43:27]
 
[Edited by BillyG. on 2004-09-13 23:44:53]
 

Alec§taar,
 
One question for you. Have you tried to install your OS to the Cenatek drive? If so, how does that perform? XP would not fit, but I believe your running 2k.

talking about fried-brain lol, after messing with 4 different vendor applications yesterday and 2 of those this morning, I started from scratch and after a reboot, was in with the QSOFT RamDisk in 2 minutes NO PROBLEM... it pushed it's own size limit out to 3MB for me and that was it!
 
Thx Christiaan @ QSOFT and Alec here!
 
now back to all those yummy tweaks that Alec mentioned earlier in this thread...